Solar Activity Drives Climate Change

Has solar activity influenced Earth climate over geologic time? If so, how does it change climate? How will ongoing solar activity alter climate in our immediate future?

It seems a silly notion to ignore the primary source of heat and light on Earth when talking about climate change.

Yet, that is exactly what the IPCC has done in every climate assessment report, including AR5 just released.

The IPCC ignores the sun! It’s justification is total solar irradiance (TSI) varies by only ±0.5 W/m2 measured over the last 3 solar cycles. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

The Austrian Way: The matter of high energy prices

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Bogpaper

Energy companies in the UK have just been putting through their latest ‘evil’ price hikes, causing the most almighty furore.

The carry on has been so enormous, you’d think some ethnic cleansing or the like had being going on.

What is most painful about this whole episode – for us soon-to-be-institutionalised-Bogpaperites at least – is that it really shows what a Statist shit show our economy has become. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Do the Math – Count the cash

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Paul Driessen

Some years ago, a telegenic televangelist built quite an empire before publicly falling from grace and adopting a less opulent life style. But back then he liked big homes and Lear jets with Rolls Royce engines and, even though Dennis’s lab primarily did environmental monitoring, his chief pilot came there because he needed demanding analyses on the methanol fuels he used for extra thrust.

The lab did the analyses uneventfully for several months, until it discovered an unpaid invoice. When Dennis inquired about it, the pilot said, “Sometimes he doesn’t pay certain bills, because the Lord told him people could contribute to the ministry in that fashion.” Dennis told him that was OK, but the next time one of those private jets is taking off and the pilot hits the injection fuel switch, the lab couldn’t guarantee that the analysis on that batch of fuel was accurate. The bill was paid in three days.

Big Wind’s Dirty Little Secret: Toxic Lakes and Radioactive Waste

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Institute for Energy Research

The wind industry promotes itself as better for the environment than traditional energy sources such as coal and natural gas. For example, the industry claims that wind energy reduces carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

But there are many ways to skin a cat. As IER pointed out last week, even if wind curbs CO2 emissions, wind installations injure, maim, and kill hundreds of thousands of birds each year in clear violation of federal law. Any marginal reduction in emissions comes at the expense of protected bird species, including bald and golden eagles. The truth is, all energy sources impact the natural environment in some way, and life is full of necessary trade-offs. The further truth is that affordable, abundant energy has made life for billions of people much better than it ever was.

Another environmental trade-off concerns the materials necessary to construct wind turbines. Modern wind turbines depend on rare earth minerals mined primarily from China. Unfortunately, given federal regulations in the U.S. that restrict rare earth mineral development and China’s poor record of environmental stewardship, the process of extracting these minerals imposes wretched environmental and public health impacts on local communities. It’s a story Big Wind doesn’t want you to hear. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Reality Check: Germany’s Defective Green Energy Game Plan

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Alexander Neubacher

Germany pretends to be a pioneer in the green revolution. But its massively expensive Energiewende has done nothing to make the environment cleaner or encourage genuine efficiency. One writer argues: Either do it right, or don’t do it at all.

So, perhaps you’ve heard about Germany’s heroic green revolution, about how it’s overhauling its entire energy infrastructure to embrace renewable energy sources? Well, in reality, our chimney stacks are spewing out more than ever, and coal consumption jumped 8 percent in the first half of 2013. Germans are pumping more climate-killing CO2 into the air than they have in years. And people are surprised.

Why coal, you might ask? Aren’t Germans installing rooftop solar panels and wind turbines everywhere? What’s being done with the billions of euros from the renewable energy surcharge, which is tacked onto Germans’ power bills to subsidize green energy and due to rise again soon? This is certainly not how we imagined the Energiewende, Germany’s push to abandon nuclear energy and promote renewable sources, which Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government launched in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

When Governments Cite Greenpeace

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Donna Laframboise

An Energy Minister who boasts that his decision is supported by Greenpeace is an Energy Minister spectacularly out-of-touch with ordinary voters.

I live in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Our Energy Minister is a gent named Bob Chiarelli.

From my perspective, his primary responsibility is to keep energy prices as low as possible. As Germany and other jurisdictions have discovered, when electricity costs too much, businesses flee – taking jobs with them (see here, here, here and here).

Working families, young people near the bottom of the wage ladder, and seniors on fixed incomes all have especially tight budgets. The more these people are forced to pay for electricity, the fewer dollars they have to spend on other things. Like food. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

IPCC Adjusts Model-Predicted Near-Term Warming Downwards

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Bob Tisdale

This is another post that illustrates and discusses just how poorly climate models simulate one of the most important climate variables: global surface temperatures. I’ve included a copy of this post in pdf format, linked at the end, for readers who would like to treat this post as a supplement to my ebook Climate Models Fail.

My blog post No Matter How the CMIP5 (IPCC AR5) Models Are Presented They Still Look Bad was cross posted at WattsUpWithThat here. Scrolling down through that WUWT thread, you’ll find a comment by Bill Illis: – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Power lines, the Army and arsonist kids helped ignite some NSW bushfires

Posted on October 29, 2013 by The k2p blog

The bushfires in New South Wales seem – after great efforts by the fire services – to be under control. No doubt some rain has helped.

Of course some of the great unwashed immediately blamed “global warming”. The self proclaimed – and now self-employed – “Climate Council” was of course leading the charge. Tony Abbott called their claims “hogwash” but he was being rather polite. The bushfires are an annual event every spring and have occurred every year for at least the last 200 years. It may well be something that has occurred annually for over 10,000 years.

It now transpires that in addition to natural causes, many of the fires were caused by accidents (the army’s exercises and power lines) and some were caused by juvenile delinquents – some as young as 8 years old! It could be that the power lines initiated this latest outbreak. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Shale Gas Revolutionizing World Energy

Targeting CO2 reductions is the latest new weapon added to President Obama’s U.S. energy policy arsenal.

Within weeks the EPA is expected to impose harsh penalties on coal and natural gas electric power plants by specifically targeting their emissions.

That has never been done before anywhere in the world.

However, barely two years before President Obama took office an amazing thing happened. Shale gas literally came out of nowhere to alter global energy as we know it.

The genie is out of the bottle. Shale gas is changing everything. Shale will supply plentiful, eco-friendly global energy for the rest of this century. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Do we trust climate models or observations?

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Trust, yet verify

In the VRT news section (in Dutch) the assumed impacts of climate change on Flemish agriculture in 2050. It is the doctoral dissertation of Eline Vanuytrecht: Crop Responses to Climate Change: Impact on Agricultural Production and the Soil Water Balance in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It basically says that on the one hand the agricultural production could potentially rise (because of the increase in CO2), but on the other hand the stability of the harvest is in great danger. This because of droughts in summer and water supplies will come under increased pressure. This means harvests will reduce significantly.

The solution was a bit of an anticlimax. After first explaining how bad it all would be, the most plausible solutions seem to be planting our crops earlier in the year (which was admitted farmers already do intuitively). Or things like planting other varieties and possible irrigation (less plausible due to high cost). It seems adapting to that “great danger” seems rather simple and farmers already are capable of doing. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________